Jimmy Buffett Passes Away at 76 Transcript

Welcome back. Flowers lay in a small memorial inside the Margaritaville Resort in New York City, honoring Jimmy Buffett who passed away at the age of 76. Stephanie Elam looks back at his journey to Margaritaville and all the places in between.

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Jimmy Buffett’s laid back songs captured the feel of lazy days in paradise.

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Some called his signature sound, Gulf and Western, a mix of country and Caribbean music.

I love the Caribbean through a sort of a strange way. My grandfather was a sailing ship captain and he sang the Calypso songs. So all this sort of amalgamation of material came in and came back out, and I learned to be a performer and that gave me the vehicle to do it.

Buffet was born Christmas Day, 1946 on the Gulf Coast in southern Mississippi and raised in the port city of Mobile, Alabama. He began his career making country music, but only really found his musical voice after moving to Key West in the seventies.

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His time among the colorful characters there helped inspire his tropical style, and eventually led to his landmark 1977 album, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, and its famous hit song, Margaritaville.

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But Buffett’s greatest musical success was on the concert stage, not the charts. He made hundreds of millions of dollars touring over the decades supported by his legion of diehard fans known as Parrotheads.

The audience is just so much fun for me to look at. They’re as entertaining to me as I hope I am to them.

His music may have been laid back, but Buffet brought so much energy to his life. He piloted airplanes, wrote bestselling books, raised funds for democratic candidates, and amassed a fortune estimated at $1 billion through his Margaritaville Lifestyle brand, which included restaurants, hotels, resorts, and casinos. Like his music, it was all geared toward capturing the magic of the tropical places Buffett love best.

From New Orleans to the Gulf Coast, down into St. Bart’s and other places. I still can find magic in most of those places where people think there isn’t any left.